(Reuters) – When the moon passes immediately in entrance of the solar on Aug. 21, casting a deep shadow throughout america, hundreds of citizen scientists shall be watching the eclipse whereas monitoring temperature modifications, animal conduct and radio alerts bouncing across the environment.

MEERKATS are endearing creatures. Indeed, they are so endearing that they have been turned into characters in a long-running series of advertisements on British television for a price-comparison website. But nothing comes from nothing. Thirty years ago, few non-zoologists would have heard of these social mongooses and the joke would not have worked. The animals were brought to public prominence by a television documentary, “Meerkats United”, which described the doings of a group of them in the Kalahari, where they live. That documentary relied, in turn, on a research project run by David Macdonald, a zoologist at Oxford University. In essence, meerkats as a cultural phenomenon were created by this project.

Had that creation been purely artistic, it would be protected by copyright. Royalties derived from such copyright might then have been used for further study and conservation of the animals in question. Sadly for zoologists, the natural world is not covered by copyright…Continue readingScience and technology

AFTER the events of March 11th 2011, when an earthquake and tsunami led to a meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant in Japan, you might be forgiven for concluding that atomic power and seawater don’t mix. Many engineers, though, do not agree. They would like to see more seawater involved, not less. In fact, they have plans to site nuclear power plants in the ocean rather than on land—either floating on the surface or moored beneath it.

At first, this sounds a mad idea. It is not. Land-based power stations are bespoke structures, built by the techniques of civil engineering, in which each is slightly different and teams of specialists come and go according to the phase of the project. Marine stations, by contrast, could be mass-produced in factories using, if not the techniques of the assembly line, then at least those of the shipyard, with crews constantly employed.

That would make power stations at sea cheaper than those on land. Jacopo…Continue readingScience and technology

Levitation strategies are now not confined to the laboratory due to engineers who’ve developed a better means for suspending matter in mid-air by creating a Three-D-printed acoustic levitator.All Top News — ScienceDaily

A Triceratops or Tyrannosaurus rex bulling its approach by way of a pine forest doubtless dislodged flowers that 100 million years later have been recognized of their fossilized kind as a brand new species of tree.All Top News — ScienceDaily

Protecting 70 % of Earth’s floor, the world’s oceans are huge and deep. So huge, in truth, that just about each coastal nation has the potential to satisfy its personal home seafood wants by aquaculture. In actual fact, every nation might achieve this utilizing a tiny fraction of its ocean territory.All Top News — ScienceDaily

If the potential for clever life to exist someplace within the universe is so giant, then the place is all people? In a brand new paper, an astrophysicist argues that species comparable to ours go extinct quickly after attaining excessive ranges of know-how.All Top News — ScienceDaily

“KEEP death off the road”, a Ministry of Transport slogan once enjoined the people of Britain. And it worked. Both driving and being a pedestrian have become far safer over the past few decades in Britain and many other countries. One consequence, though, is a shortage of human organs available for transplant. Waiting lists for such transplants have thus grown. In July, more than 117,000 people were awaiting suitable donors in the United States alone. An alternative source of supply is needed. And a paper published in Science this week, by Luhan Yang and her colleagues at eGenesis, an American biotechnology company, may help pave the way to providing it.

Dr Yang and her team are working on pigs. The idea of using pig organs as substitutes for human ones has been around for a while. Pigs are well studied and easy to breed. They are also about the same size as people, meaning that their internal bits and pieces are,…Continue readingScience and technology

(Reuters) – Scientists at a Massachusetts firm looking for to make pig organs protected sufficient to be transplanted into people have used gene-editing expertise to clone piglets that lack a doubtlessly harmful retrovirus, in response to a examine launched on Thursday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The lemon-sized fossil cranium of an toddler ape nicknamed Alesi that inhabited a Kenyan forest about 13 million years in the past is providing a peek at what the long-ago widespread ancestor of individuals and all trendy apes might have appeared like.

FRICTION burns. And the friction of the air on something travelling at five times the speed of sound burns hot. The leading edge of such an object can easily reach a temperature of 3,000°C. Inconveniently, that is above the melting point of most materials used by engineers, which makes it hard to design things like wings and nose cones for aircraft intended to achieve hypersonic velocities. The lure of hypersonic flight is such, though, that many are trying to do so. The world’s air forces would love such planes. And for civilians (at least, for those with deep pockets), the idea of being able to jet in a couple of hours from Britain to Australia sounds extremely attractive.

Among those lured are Ping Xiao and his colleagues at the University of Manchester, in England, and in Central South University in Changsha, China. And they think they have come up with a new material that might provide the answer.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In dense Chinese language forests populated by dinosaurs 160 million years in the past, two furry critters resembling flying squirrels glided from tree to tree, exhibiting that even in such a dangerous neighborhood early mammals had succeeded in going airborne.

HOLOGRAPHY is a useful technology, but somehow faintly disappointing. The fantasy is of a “Star Trek” style holodeck, or even the less ambitious idea of three-dimensional television pictures. The reality, for the man or woman in the street, is smudgy images that act as security features on credit cards, passports and an increasing number of banknotes.

Holography does have many uses beyond this. These include projecting 3D art displays in museums, enabling measurements to be made with great precision using a technique called holographic interferometry, and accurately assessing the three dimensions of packages for shipping companies. But the difference between the high-quality holograms required for those applications and the quotidian credit-card variety is that a laser and special equipment are needed to project them. Indeed, if the hologram is in colour, three lasers are needed, one for each primary: red, green and blue. The result is not always persuasive. Getting the primary…Continue readingScience and technology

IT IS risky to predict who and what will win a Nobel prize. But some discoveries are so big that their receipt of science’s glitziest gong seems only a matter of time. One such is CRISPR-Cas9, a powerful gene-editing technique that is making the fraught and fiddly business of altering the genetic material of living organisms much easier.

Biologists have taken to CRISPR-Cas9 with gusto, first with animal experiments and now with tests on humans. In March researchers in China made history when they reported its first successful application to a disease-causing genetic mutation in human embryos. But their results were mixed. Although they achieved 100% success in correcting the faulty gene behind a type of anaemia called favism, they tested the technique in only two affected embryos. Of four others, carrying a mutation that causes thalassaemia, another anaemia, only one was successfully edited.

After conducting a cosmic stock of types to calculate and categorize stellar-remnant black holes, astronomers have concluded that there are most likely tens of thousands and thousands of the enigmatic, darkish objects within the Milky Means – way over anticipated.All Top News — ScienceDaily

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – Rocket Lab, a Silicon Valley-funded area launch firm, mentioned a contractor’s error was accountable for its maiden flight failing to succeed in orbit in Could, however that the issue had been fastened forward of one other deliberate launch within the subsequent two months.